Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

There’s nothing stopping Microsoft from coming out with a new phone line, other than poor management.

Windows Phone failed because there were no apps for it. There was no YouTube app, no Facebook app, no Twitter app, etc until very late or never at all. They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones. The OS was great and worked on a wide range of hardware. It could have been a great enterprise solution and they seemed to be heading that direction but the lack of third party made it little more than A Microsoft feature phone.

Serves them right for what they did to Nokia.

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Windows phone was the best phone OS I ever experienced. Features were years ahead of iOS and Android.

By the time he was CEO it was already dead. He was right to kill it.

I have my doubts that a three-horse phone race would have been stable in the first place, as one of those three (Android, iPhone was too established) would have likely fallen out of favor. And then, you all would be complaining about monopolistic practices Microsoft would inevitably be doing.

Google is not a good company, but they have treated Android much better than they could be.

Remember when Microsoft had an awkward funeral for the iPhone?

https://www.cnet.com/pictures/microsofts-funeral-for-the-iphone-photos/

I worked selling cellphones when Windows Phone was trying to compete. Their failure was lack of apps. From what I understand, it was difficult to port apps from Android or iOS to Windows Phone OS. It's a shame because the user experience was bar none. Hell, I installed a Windows OS theme on my Android for years. I still think they could make a comeback if they made an actual, honest to God Windows Phone that ran all Windows apps.

Microsoft had every advantage. They were in the mobile space for years before Apple with PocketPC. They also had a freaking tablet.

They fucked it up with uninspired design (a start menu and task bar on a mobile?!) and lack of follow through.

He finally admitted to it. I was a Windows Phone user until the end. It’s sad that it was discontinued.

Dropping their plans for Continuum was foolish. Now we have fully featured Linux-based phones like the PinePhone that succeed where Microsoft's plans for Continuum failed. (As in you can plug the PinePhone into peripherals for a desktop experience.)

Phones are pushing CPUs and RAM that are on par with laptops and desktops at this point. It seems a little superfluous if we're not allowed to do real computing on these machines. Continuum was what I saw as the future of General Purpose Computing, by taking the locked down OS design of smart phones and giving them a desktop experience when plugged into peripherals.

Once every phone is also a desktop, you suddenly have opened all kinds of options for people who only have a phone, and not a full computer. Which, last I checked, is the majority of internet users who access it via their phones. Continuum would have been a literal game changer, and they gave up on it.

It would become a situation where everyone is like "I already have my phone, I'm not even going to bring my laptop unless I need it for specific function." Because once your phone can be an on-the-go desktop, laptops will have less allure.

It's really was.

As much as I dislike Microsoft, back in 2015 I used Windows Phone 8.1 for about 6 months and I absolutely loved it, the UI was so smooth and polished, even on low end phones, until WP10 came out and it ran like trash and I went back to LineageOS.

It is funny to me that they gave up on the Windows phone right when it was starting to actually kinda work and gain some market traction.

my favourite windows phone moment was when they had a funeral for the iphone lol

There really was something about the windows phone UI though. If you weren't around to try it, it's hard to properly explain how different and fresh the flat pane interface felt compared to iOS and Android. It really was a phenomenal design language compared to the same old thing in the market.

I honestly believe it they had just sucked it up and subsidized the cost of doubling the ram on those last Nokia devices, it could have been good enough to break through. Microsoft had everything possible to gain from integrating the desktop-to-mobile workflow for business clients. Then they threw it out the window...

Seriously, I doubt many people here who aren't used to corporate environments can fully understand how big the market was, that Microsoft gave up, by not spending enough to fill the BlackBerry hole that formed. They had 98% of the solution already developed, and fumbled the ball with a single yard left to go.

There was room for three players, if one of them actually serviced the business environment; and nobody was better positioned to do so than Microsoft at the time. Excel and PowerPoint that synced from your work machine, to the field, in a zero trust environment... Gah.. they were so close.

De-Googled android is what you want.

My first smart phone was a windows phone

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THANK YOU! That's what we were all saying when you stopped caring about it.

In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.

I'm sorry but no, Microsoft was never going to be capable of reinventing any category of computing. They've never done it before and it's just not within their expertise. I think Nadella was right at the time to cut their losses. Windows Phone represented Microsoft's best efforts in that space and, while it had its fans, it just wasn't enough.

Meanwhile, they've done really well with their "apps and services on every platform" approach. How many millions of people use Outlook on their phone? How many apps are running their back end on Azure? Microsoft may have given up on an aspect of "mobile," but is still raking in piles of cash from what people actually do on mobile devices. Take the win where you can find it.

They also botched the implementation of Android on Windows. They just don't understand the market.

I think they can still reboot with an Android base. They can just do what they did for edge. Pull a Google. Sell hardware with very polished software. Android would give them full access to all Android apps. Also they already have outlook and office apps made for android.

Windows Phone was my favourite phone OS. I loved my Lumia 925.

It's never too late for another try, when you got a few billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket. There is a market for it, if done right.

The UI seemed really good, I was really tempted. But I was ultimately thrown off by App support in general. Wasn't there a thing, that Apps often weren't equal to their Android and iOS counterparts?

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I used a Windows Phone way back in high school, I think it was an Xperia, the build quality was great and the performance was smoother than my friends' Androids and iPhones. Too bad there wasn't a lot of apps, that was the only down side though.

I really miss that UI, live tiles were so nice. there's launchers on android that mimic it, but it's not the same.

Now do win 10/11

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

I had a Windows phone for years and loved it. But I'm glad it went the way of the dinosaur because it forced me to get a pixel which is even better.

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As long as they don't make another windows 8 style issue I don't see the issue of extra phone competition.

Phone companies are probably better off without Microsoft helping.

Yep

@Hypx Couldn't a current flagship run windows 11 without breaking a sweat? I'm sure there are some hardware architecture issues, but one has to wonder if a pocket size MS Surface with a 5G antenna isn't relatively straightforward to release.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is the third chief executive of the software giant to admit the company has made some serious mobile mistakes.

Satya Nadella took over from former CEO Steve Ballmer in 2014 and, just over a year later, wrote off $7.6 billion related to Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nokia phone business.

Asked about a strategic mistake or wrong decision that he might regret, Nadella responds:

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was also slow to respond to Android and the iPhone threat, focusing the company’s efforts on Windows Mobile while famously laughing at the iPhone, calling it the “most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.”

“I regret there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows [Vista] that we weren’t able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone,” explained Ballmer.

The company is constantly updating its Phone Link app to link Android and even iPhone handsets to Windows, and Microsoft has a close relationship with Samsung to ensure its mobile Office apps are preinstalled on Samsung’s Android handsets.

The original article contains 378 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Which time?

hey microsoft, get fucked.

No it wasn’t. MS was well behind at the time, and the market had settled on Google and Apple as the two mobile OS providers. The mistake would have been to keep going.

You can consider me conspiracy theorist, but for me the whole story about WP/Nokia was to destroy the biggest non US tech giant, so the remaining are all US based. No one are now even close.